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Dancing with Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering

BY Phillip Moffitt

Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering. Reflecting on his own journey from Esquire editor-in-chief to Buddhist teacher, Phillip Moffitt provides a fresh perspective on the Buddha's ancient wisdom, showing how to move from suffering to new awareness and unanticipated joy

Why do we suffer? Is there a purpose to our pain? Can we affect how much we suffer? Noting that human beings have wrestled with such questions for thousands of years, Phillip Moffitt has found answers for his own life in Buddhist philosophy. In this deeply spiritual book that is sure to become a Buddhist classic, he explores the twelve insights that underlie the Buddha's core teaching-the Four Noble Truths-and uses these often neglected insights to guide readers to more meaningful lives.

With insightful writing and a strong message of self-empowerment, Dancing with Life offers a prescriptive path for finding joy and peace that will appeal to readers of "Dharma Wisdom," Moffitt's bimonthly column in Yoga Journal, as well as anyone searching for a more meaningful life.

YOUR LIFE IS INSEPARABLE FROM SUFFERING
T
he Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths begins with the injunction that if you are to attain liberation, you must understand and fully experience how your life is entwined and defined by “dukkha,” meaning your mental experiences of discomfort, pain, anxiety, stress, instability, inadequacy, failure, and disappointment, each of which is felt as suffering in your mind. This teaching is often referred to as the “Truth of Suffering.”

Understanding the First Noble Truth involves the practice and realization of three specific insights about dukkha: first, realizing that the philosophical description that life seems to elicit feelings of dukkha at every turn is correct; secondly, gaining insight into your suffering by penetrating it with conscious awareness day by day, moment by moment; and finally, deeply accepting this truth as part of your life and that it affects how your mind reacts to all your experience.

The Buddha was a great pragmatist. As a spiritual teacher, he was interested in teaching what could be achieved through a persevering and patient practice; he was not interested in ¬teaching metaphysics. A story tells of how the Buddha was walking through the forest one day with his students when he stopped to pick up a handful of leaves. Holding his hand out with the leaves in it, he asked, “Are there more leaves on all the trees in the forest or in my hand?” Naturally, they answered, “There are more leaves in the forest.” “What I know is as great as the leaves on all of these trees,” the Buddha replied, gesturing around the forest. “But what I teach is equal to this handful of leaves.” What did the handful of leaves that the Buddha was holding represent? On numerous occasions he made it perfectly clear by declaring, “I teach only suffering and the end of suffering.”

Oftentimes, the First Noble Truth is misquoted as “All life is suffering,” but that is an inaccurate and misleading reflection of the Buddha’s insight. He did not teach that life is constant misery, nor that you should expect to feel pain and unhappiness at all times. Rather, he proclaimed that suffering is an unavoidable reality of ordinary human existence that is to be known and responded to wisely.

The Buddha really understood the human predicament, didn’t he? Even when your life is going well, you always feel the pressure to keep it going, the anxiety that it won’t, the endless wanting of “more” or “different,” and the frustration of being upset by life’s constant little traumas and challenges. There is no lasting resting point for the unliberated mind, only some brief moments of appreciation and immersion, and then the mind starts worrying, planning, feeling tension all over again. Life is a never-ending dance between moments of feeling good and moments of feeling bad. The pleasant moments may be mildly enjoyable, positively joyful, or even ecstatic. Likewise, the unpleasant moments may be boring, irritating, painful, or overwhelmingly awful. While you, like all beings, may try your hardest to experience only the good and avoid the bad, there is simply no way for any of us to escape unpleasant experiences. They are part of the dance, life being true to its own nature.

It is vital to your experience of the Twelve Insights that you interpret “suffering” in the sense that the Buddha originally intended, as an umbrella term whose true purpose is to invite you to reflect on the entire range of negative human emotional reactions. The stress or unease that is dukkha—alienation, despair, uncertainty, lack of control, grief, frustration, fear, anger, longing—constitutes your mind and heart’s resistance to life being simply as it is. Dukkha can also be understood as the discomfort of inhabiting a body, with all its physical vulnerabilities and pain. And it can refer to the unease you experience because you have conscious knowledge of how scary and uncertain life is and the inevitability of death. Sometimes the words unsatisfactory and unreliable are used to describe dukkha, for the way life can let you down when things don’t go as you’d hoped and planned.

There is suffering that originates from external events and the suffering you experience because of how you process those events in your own mind. It is an objective fact that your life is filled with challenges, from illness to conflict with others to the death of loved ones. An outside observer witnessing your life would be able to confirm that this is so. But in addition to—or more accurately, in reaction to—these objective painful experiences, you also have an internal experience. Your mind is filled with a seemingly endless stream of emotions that arise in reaction to what’s going on around you. It is this subjective type of suffering that the Buddha is primarily addressing in the First Noble Truth. As you deepen your understanding of this richer and more complex meaning of dukkha, you will find opportunities for freedom and well-being that you never even knew existed.